The Irish Medical Organization (IMO) has warned that overcrowding and staff shortages are leading to deaths and poor healthcare outcomes.
IMO members will gather in Killarney today for the Annual General Meeting, with Health Secretary Stephen Donnelly due to speak at the conference on Saturday.
IMO President Dr. John Cannon has said that caring for people on trolleys in hallways and in inadequate facilities is inappropriate. As a result, there would be preventable deaths, he said.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, he said: “very medical body in the world will say that when you run your hospital over capacity and when you don’t have appropriate places to treat and care for patients, you will inevitably have poor outcomes and unfortunately in extreme circumstances, some of those poor outcomes actually include fatalities and deaths,” reports RTE.
Failure to place people in appropriate environments leads to inevitable deaths, he said.
“The issue and the blame certainly doesn’t lie at the foot of emergency departments. It’s the ability for those patients, once they’re triaged and treated, to be moved into an appropriate settings, onto appropriate wards, and that’s where the issue comes,” reports RTE.
He said Ireland has around 2.9 hospital beds per thousand people, compared to the EU average of around 4.7 beds per thousand people.
Ireland’s occupancy rate is around 90% but the EU average is 70-75%, he explained.
He urged the minister to invest in healthcare “to reflect demand, not to reflect fiscal policy. Firstly, and we are investing, but it’s not enough to keep up with the growth of the population or the growth of demand for health service. So, the first thing we need is we need a generational level of investment,” reports RTE.
Secretary-General Phil Ni Sheighdha said: “There’s very little discharge and very little movement,” reports RTE.
Speaking to Philippa Boucher-Hayes on RTÉs Today, Ms Ni Sheighdha said it was becoming increasingly difficult to provide secure care.
Meanwhile, she called the lifting of the mask requirement in hospitals next week “absolutely the wrong move right now”, reports RTE.
Ms Ni Sheighdha said that due to the overcrowding, many people are falling victim to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases and conditions in the hospitals.
If we had a full hospital system, it would have been okay to make such a decision, but it’s not, she said.
“If you had a perfect hospital system that had single rooms and everybody was being cared for in isolation – that’s fine to make these types of infection prevention and control announcements. But when you have an overcrowded environment with overcrowded wards, overcrowded EDs – this is absolutely the wrong move right now,” reports RTE.
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